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Crytek sues Star Citizen dev Cloud Imperium Games

14 December, 2017, 14:43 | Author: Patty Aguilar
  • Crytek sues Star Citizen dev Cloud Imperium Games

Crytek alleges that the use of their CryEngine branding in Star Citizen was a "critical component" of the agreement between the two companies.

Crytek is suing Roberts Space Industries and Cloud Imperium Games for multiple counts of breaching the game license agreement that they signed to use the CryEngine to develop Star Citizen back in 2012. You can head over to DSOG and read the list of complaints against the companies, but what is odd is that those games no longer use the Crytek engine, but Crytek is arguing that it is being rebuffed after considerable investments for the project. Now we don't know whether Crytek and Cloud Imperium settled things when the latter chose to move to the Lumberyard.

This lawsuit, filed in USA district court in California, has the potential to disrupt development of a game that is already more than five years in development and has yet to deliver on many promises to its backers.

Gamasutra received a statement from Cloud Imperium games saying, in its entirety: "We are aware of the Crytek complaint having been filed in the US District Court".

Crytek is seeking damages both direct and indirect, as well as an injunction preventing Star Citizen from continuing to use CryEngine. A developer that feels forced to switch engines for one reason or another is doing so at great cost, even if presumably the switch to Lumberyard was relatively painless given the shared origins.


In December 2016, CIG and RSI said they were moving off of CryEngine 3 in favor of Amazon's Lumberyard product.

Picking further through the complaint from Crytek, here are the key points in the document. This part here is quite flimsy because Crytek is working under the assumption that Facewear had access to the suite of CryEngine tools source code, but we don't know exactly what they had access to.

Crytek say that CIG and RSI received "a substantial reduction from Crytek's usual licensing fees in view of the promotional consideration". The contract was that CIG would only use CryEngine exclusively to make the game. This relationship was later formalised after the Kickstarter push with a Game License Agreement which Crytek says was done at a below-market price.

Then, in June of this year, Crytek say they sent another letter requesting bug fixes and optimisations and that so far CIG and RSI "have not made a good faith effort to provide Crytek with the promised bug fixes and optimizations to the CryEngine as a complete, compilable version".

Star Citizen is the creation of gaming veteran Chris Roberts, who was behind the development of the iconic Wing Commander series of space games.

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